Georges Guynemer eBook

One of the frescoes of Puvis de Chavannes in the Pantheon,
the last to the left, represents an old woman leaning
over a stone terrace and gazing at the town beneath
her with its moonlit roofs and its surrounding plain,
looking bluish in the night. The city is asleep,
but the holy woman watches and prays. She stands
tall and upright as a lily. Her lamp, which is
seen at the entrance of her house, is one long stem
illuminated by the flame. She, too, is like this
lamp. Her emaciated body would be nothing without
her ardent face. Her serenity can only come from
work well done and confidence in the future. Lutetia,
represented in this picture by Genevieve, is not anxious;
yet she listens as if she might hear once more the
threatening approach of Attila. It is because
she knows that the barbarians may come back again,
and can only be stopped by invincible faith.

As long as France keeps her belief, she is secure.
The life and death of a Guynemer are an act of faith
in immortal France.

ENVOI

The ballades of olden times used to conclude
with an envoi addressed to some powerful person
and invariably beginning with King, Queen, Prince
or Princess. But the poet was occasionally at
a loss, for, as Theodore de Banville observes in his
Petit traite de Poesie Francaise, “everybody
has not a prince handy to whom to dedicate his ballade.”

Guynemer’s biography is of such a nature that
it must seem like a poem: why not, then, conclude
it with an envoi? I have no difficulty
in finding a Prince, for I shall select him from among
the French schoolboys. There is a little Paul
Bailly, not quite twelve years old, from Bouclans,
a village in Franche-Comte, who wrote a beautiful theme
on Guynemer: he shall be my Prince. And through
him I shall address all the French schoolboys or girls,
in all the French towns and villages.

Little Prince, I have no doubt that you love arithmetic,
and I will give you accurate figures which will satisfy
your taste. You will like to know that Guynemer
flew for 665 hours and 55 seconds in all, which I
added up from his flying notebooks: his last flight
is not recorded in them, because it never stopped.

As for the number of fights in which he was engaged,
that is difficult to ascertain. Guynemer himself
did not seem anxious to be sure about it. But
it must be more than 600, and might well be 700 or
800. Your Guynemer, our Guynemer, will never
be surpassed: not because he forgot to hand over
to his successors, rivals, and avengers the sacred
flame which in France can never go out, but because
genius is an exceptional privilege, and because the
present methods of fighting in the air are not in
favor of single combats but engage whole units.

You will also love to hear about Guynemer as an inventor,
and the creator of a magic airplane. Some day
this airplane will be exhibited; and perhaps some
of your little friends have already seen at the Invalides
the machine in which Guynemer brought down nineteen
German airplanes. On November 1, 1917, thousands
of Parisians visited it; and it was strewn with magnificent
bunches of chrysanthemums, to which many people added
clusters of violets.